J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Tour to the Alps 1836 > Fort Bard Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Sketches: Looking down the Susa Valley from the Mont Cenis Road, with the Sacra di San Michele in the Distance; Lake and Hospice at the Mont Cenis Pass 1836

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Sketches: Looking down the Susa Valley from the Mont Cenis Road, with the Sacra di San Michele in the Distance; Lake and Hospice at the Mont Cenis Pass’ 1836
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 85 Verso:
Two Sketches: Looking down the Susa Valley from the Mont Cenis Road, with the Sacra di San Michele in the Distance; Lake and Hospice at the Mont Cenis Pass 1836
D29367
Turner Bequest CCXCIV 84a
Pencil on white wove paper, 104 x 148 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Cenis’, ‘Suza’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains two sketches:
i. (main sketch) Looking along the Susa valley from the Mont Cenis Road, with the Sacra di San Michele in at the foot of the Susa valley in the distance; inscribed ‘Suza’ [sic]. The same vista is recorded at intervals in several other sketches in this sketchbook (for example D29360; Turner Bequest CCXCIV 81) and in a watercolour sometimes called A View along an Alpine Valley, probably the Val d’Aosta (private collection).1
ii. (above right) A thumbnail sketch of a plain between hills with distant mountains, inscribed ‘Cenis’, and probably depicting the lake and hospice at the Mont Cenis Pass. Both sketches are hurried and unsteady, and were possibly taken on the move or from a coach.

David Hill
June 2010

1
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, London 1979, p.472 no.1432 as ‘View down the Val d’Aosta’.

How to cite

David Hill, ‘Two Sketches: Looking down the Susa Valley from the Mont Cenis Road, with the Sacra di San Michele in the Distance; Lake and Hospice at the Mont Cenis Pass 1836 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, February 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-two-sketches-looking-down-the-susa-valley-from-the-mont-r1144917, accessed 26 April 2024.